Revival
Joe Loya has been to hell and back. He's going onstage to tell you all about it.

By Ben Ehrenreich

ABOUT MIDWAY THROUGH our interview – which is really just a chance for me to ask nosy questions I wouldn't normally ask, and with a tape recorder running – I tell Joe that I've been searching for a way to open this article and that the best thing I've come up with is this sentence: "It takes constant effort to be Joe Loya." He lets out one of those huge Joe Loya laughs, all that energy and effort he keeps coiled up inside unraveling fast in a great white blast of glee. And then he's quiet. "Absolutely," he nods, still smiling. "It does take effort."

So there it is. It takes constant effort to be Joe Loya, bank robber turned writer, storyteller extraordinaire. You can see it in his stance, in the way he moves. Joe's a big man, not tall but solidly built, with a heavy chest and broad shoulders. I watch him wash dishes in the kitchen of his East Oakland home. He moves quickly, in discrete bursts, sponging the counter, rinsing out the sponge, shaking the water from his hands, holding forth about the stresses of memorizing the monologue for his one-man show (The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell, which opens Nov. 4 at the Thick House) while struggling to meet the deadline for his memoir (which HarperCollins plans to publish next fall). But even seated – exhausted, as I've often seen him on my couch in Los Angeles after a long day of talking to relatives he hasn't seen for years, since before he went to prison, his eyes half closed from emotional fatigue – he looks ready to leap to his feet, like there's a steel spring in him that will never, ever unwind.

Joe's voice is large, and the words come fast, the rhythms a hybrid of the cell block and the seminar, with more than a little revival-tent testifying thrown in. Only in the afternoon, sitting on a park bench in Pacific Heights after a solid day of talking – about his ambivalence about ethnicity, about his depressions, about sorrow for his victims and for prison friends who've died – do I manage to wear him out. His voice softens and slows. I ask him about the source and object of all this effort, his Decision, if it gradually built or if it happened in a single blinding moment. He sits silently for a long while and rubs his eyes. "It built," he says. "It started building in solitary confinement. Solitary was hard. Solitary is what fatigued me."

Joe had tried to change himself before and failed. During the two years he spent in solitary confinement, locked alone in his cell for 23 hours a day, he came across a sentence in an essay by Pico Iyer: "It is in silence that we allow a higher harmony to assert itself."

"That's where I got the metaphor," Joe says. He had always thought of change as a process of becoming something you're not, "which seemed very hard, because it was going to have to be some sort of role. I was going to have to put on a cape and whacked-out underwear and become some superhero. Now, I just had to find the strength. I had to find who I am and live close to the bone, then that would be my strength."

Over the course of the next three years, Joe says, he gave himself goals to help gauge his progress. "I wanted to cry. I felt stuff come up, and I felt like I was supposed to cry, but I couldn't. I was so disembodied from myself, and I knew that would be a sign of my having, for want of a better word, healed or repaired." His body, he says, "was just this thing that I would use. I learned to walk and stare and crowd people's space. My body was like a tool, and I had to keep it in line: I can't cry, I can't shake, I can't chew my nails, I don't want people to think I'm afraid. But I knew that when I became balanced I would have some harmony where, when I felt sad and my body said, 'Let's cry,' my mind wouldn't just say, 'No, we're not gonna cry.' " The first time came on the way home from the airport, just after his release, after seven years behind bars, from a Massachusetts federal prison. In the car with his father, his brother, and his uncle, "I just let tears flow. Man, it was good." He shakes his head, quiet now. "I knew I was going to be all right."

From the beginning

Some background: Joe and I met about a year ago through the Sundance Institute's Arts Writing Program, of which we are both fellows. (Coincidentally, the editor on this story is also a Sundance fellow and a friend; his fiancée is directing Joe's show. It's a small world.) Before I met him, I've been given to understand, Joe was a Very Bad Man. He robbed and cheated those closest to him. He bit off a man's ear long before Mike Tyson made that trick fashionable. The guy had stolen his dirty magazine. Joe bit his nostril, too. He was brutal, vindictive, wily, eternally sober and vigilant, and possessed of an intelligence as dangerous as his fists. He lived on other people's fear. I never knew him.

I met the post-Decision Joe, already five years out in the world. He was, and is, almost pathologically open, affable, and emotionally generous. Warm and playful, he inspires instant trust. The Joe I know is a goofball. Yesterday he e-mailed to ask that I not neglect to mention his "minor miracle" of "multiplying 12 tortillas and 6 pounds of carne asada into a meal to feed three thousand of my peoples of the sun when I was in Mexico." He is now, he added, "being considered a candidate for the Holy Trinity should a vacancy come open." On the phone a few hours later he elaborated that "part of the reason it's hard to be me is I got that Trinity thing hanging over me like the sword of Damocles."

We quickly became friends, and I learned, in broad strokes, the history of Joe. Here's a primer: Joe was born in 1961 in the Maravilla projects on the east side of Los Angeles. His mom and dad were 17 and 16 years old and recently born-again. His mother died when he was nine. Before that, Joe says, "I never ever felt unloved while my mother was on this planet. My dad was incredibly demonstrative. I was a very sweet and optimistic child." The Loyas were poor, but their fundamentalism put a premium on education – Joe's father, a onetime high school dropout, has learned Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, German, and Spanish, and he's now studying Chinese – and Joe grew up surrounded by books, in an "environment where everyone was talking about the meaning of the Bible and the meaning of words, epistemology, hermeneutics, all that shit."

Today Joe Loya Sr. is a gentle and palpably sad man, but following his wife's death, he allowed his grief and frustration to transmute into rage and unleashed it on his sons. Joe and his brother spent much of their adolescence in fear of their father's temper. After one especially brutal beating left Joe, then 16 years old, with a concussion and a broken rib and elbow, he stabbed his father in the throat. His father never lifted a finger against him again, but, Joe says, "I didn't realize that I'd become in bondage to a more subtle thing, and that was my rage." After that, "violence was the answer all the time."

Joe finished high school and went to community college for a couple of years. After working a string of dull jobs, when he was about 22, he began committing crimes. It was all relatively petty stuff: stealing from his boss, defrauding friends and relatives, bouncing checks, stealing cars. He was arrested in 1986 and served two years in the state penitentiary. When he got out, Joe began robbing banks. The FBI estimates he robbed between 30 and 40 over the course of 14 months, though he was only indicted for 10. One day he robbed a bank and, dissatisfied with the take, crossed the street and robbed another. In 1989, Joe was sentenced to eight years in federal prison.

After a few years behind bars, his Decision made, he began what has become an ongoing and constant rigorous self-analysis to keep his rage in check, to search for the sources of his anger not in the world outside him but in his own "disguised wounds." He began corresponding with social critic Richard Rodriguez, who became an important mentor and role model and with whom Joe remains friends today. Joe was released in 1996 and began writing essays for Pacific News Service and for a handful of newspapers and magazines. Within a year he met the woman who would become his wife, soon fell in love, and moved to Oakland from L.A. to join her. Today Joe has a book deal, a happy marriage, and a tidy hillside house with a yard big enough to tire his (almost) endlessly energetic dog, Olive. "I got a great fucking life," he says.

Carrying the weight

Joe will be telling his story a lot in upcoming months, both onstage and off, to publicize his book. That's part of the plan. "I won't reach saturation level until about three years if I get the book out there," Joe predicts, "trying to get on TV and trying to start speaking and getting on all those little news programs." I express my concern that his plan may have some unseen hazards, that this "saturation level" may be more of a burden than he expects, living always under the weight of his story, with agenda-driven wonks on all sides trying to twist it from him, his strange tale of growing up poor and abused in the barrio, doing nightmarishly hard time, and somehow emerging improved for the experience.

Joe shrugs. "They will use my lines out of context," he says. "I always say, 'The best thing that ever happened to me is solitary confinement.' I can imagine that sentence being used by police organizations, by prison guard unions, but I always, always say, 'But,' – and you don't use that without using this – 'prison was the worst experience that I ever went through.' I almost went crazy, the fucking stuff that went through my head. Fortunately, when I fragmented, I was able to fit myself back together again. A lot of guys fragment and cannot."

Despite scattered conservative leanings (like Rodriguez, Joe is opposed to affirmative action, slips occasionally i nto the rhetoric of "personal responsibility," and is deeply allergic to identity politics of all sorts), Joe is not willing to pull any simple political lessons from his story. "The justice system does not work, and for a lot of reasons that people don't even imagine," he says flatly. "You put a bunch of guys in prison, and what you don't realize is that you have to put a lot of guys into the same human squalor to protect them. When you have all that human squalor, that misery, longing, violence, sexual agony – you put all that in one space, and then you have men go in there and spend a third of their life guarding those people in that environment, it comes out and seeps its way into society."

And though he knows he will be, and already is, held up as a poster boy for self-improvement, he is blunt about the limits of his story. "A lot of people will make the mistake of sending my book to guys in prison who they want to give hope to," Joe says. But prisoners will "know what I know, which is, the reason I could be put in solitary confinement for two years and be altered for the better is because I went into prison with more resources than the person typically does who goes in there. I had education. I had been raised around books. I had language, which is important. I had metaphors for change." And, perhaps most important, he had nine happy years as a boy before it all went sour, which is nine more years than many have.

Joe takes care not to give himself too many moral props for his transformation, which he insists was not a change but "the opposite of change," a return to essence, a sort of mining operation to pull to the surface what veins of loving kindness had been occluded by decades of rage and cruelty. And for all the intensity of effort that took, and still takes, it was easier than living the life he lived. That, he says, is "the big secret of why I changed." Joe shakes his head and says, "I don't obey the laws because all of a sudden I'm this person who is into laws and I believe in the Constitution and 'We the people.' No. Most of the reason why I'm not out there robbing banks is I'm fucking tired." He laughs. "I got fatigued from living that wild, crazy, confused, insecure," he says, groping for words, literally trying to grab them out of the air with his hands, "that whole way of thinking. It. Got. Me. Tired." His voice drops on that last word. "And though this might be difficult, I guarantee that having been so many years in solitary confinement and been on that side, I know that this is easier than that."

Which is not to say that this is easy. "In there I was able to stay away from shit, but out here I'm just receiving the pulsations of the world all day long, relentlessly," he says. "And it's heavy. It's hard." Out here he has no choice but to face all the petty humiliations of living in the world, the everyday slights and stresses, the abiding sense of helplessness that adjoins civilian life. And he must face down the fleeting temptations to exorcise that sense of vulnerability with violence. That urge, to inflict his own helplessness on others and gain strength from their fear, was once automatic. "But I can pull myself back now, because I know that's not who I am, not who I want to be," he says. "I sit there and say, 'Fuck, I just gotta submit to it; I just gotta suck it up. I have to swallow it.' And recognizing that? It's like a pain that makes me double over. That's who I am now, and this is what life is for me. This is it. This is the life I choose to live." Joe is silent and contemplative, and then in a soft voice reminds himself, "I value what I have."

He recalls, just last week, after a particularly hard day, sitting on the couch in his living room, staring down at the city lit up beneath him. "I said, 'Look, you got a nice view, and you see those bars?' " He means the slender strips of wood that frame the big bay window. "Those bars can break." Joe lets out a slightly smaller, tired, true version of the huge Joe Loya laugh.

'The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell' runs through Nov. 24. Previews Sat/2-Sun/3, 8 p.m. (audience members paid $1 to attend); opens Mon/4, 8 p.m.; runs Thurs.-Sun., 8 p.m., Thick House, 1695 18th St., S.F. $15-$25 (sliding scale). (415) 401-8081.